GQ Wishes the First Day of the Republican National Convention Hadn't Been Canceled Because Watching MSNBC in Our Hotel Room Is Pretty Boring

Here in Tampa, Florida, the site of the 2012 Republican Convention, it's half-drizzling. The sky is white grey like a soaked paper towel, and the palm fronds outside my hotel room window are sort of swaying. The heavy-duty waterproof technical jacket in my bag—gifted to me by my friends in the GQ Manual Department—is probably going to go unworn. Any of us who worried the convention was going to be called off, or that we were all going to get washed out to sea, or that Romney was going to have to accept his nomination from a convention hall lit only by candles or from the roof of a car stuck in evacuation traffic on I-75, are going to feel pretty dumb.*

Still, the Republican National Convention canceled most of its first day of activities and speeches, so I'm sitting in my hotel room in North Tampa eating a Sarah Lee blueberry muffin and watching Morning Joe. Hurricane Chris Matthews is blowing and blustering all around Republican chairman Reince Preibus, who is trying to stay at clear and unclouded as the eye of the storm. Neither of them can agree, not surprisingly, on whether Mitt Romney's birth certificate line was a "moment of levity" or a coded, ugly appeal, or on who's running the more negative campaign, or if Obama is under a "European influence." This is not a high point, for any of us.

GQ will be here in Tampa until Friday, as the weather and the news pick up. Look for dispatches, interviews, and source-agitating moments of catharsis from Death Race correspondents Marin Cogan and Reid Cherlin, with occasional cameos from contributing editor Marc Ambinder.

We also wanted to find a way to visually cover the Republican and Democratic conventions that would feel special, arresting, right-friggin'-now, our small version of Richard Avedon's "The Family" in '76, or the still-potent news photography from '68. So throughout the week, Mark Peterson, a gifted photographer whose work has been published in such places as The New York Times Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and New York, will be shooting the convention, the floor, the parties, the streets outside, the speeches, the politicians, the delegates, all the weirdos dressed as Vampire-Hunting Lincoln or Tea Party Uncle Sam or Coked-Up Obama entirely on his iPhone. In their lo-fi, digital-punk way, Instagram and Hipstamatic seem particularly well-suited to capturing the political scene at its richest and at its silliest. (You'll see lots of Instagram shots this week, from lots of different journalists, but none will be as surprising and exciting as Mark's.)

Follow @GQPolitics on Twitter and Instagram to check out his photos, and we'll be publishing daily slideshows here on the site. Now we're going to head outside.

*All joking aside, the best weather reports are predicting that while Isaac will miss Tampa, the sloppy tropical storm is still organizing itself into a hurricane, and has the potential sometime Tuesday afternoon to crash right into New Orleans and Alabama's Gulf Coast, neither of which need that sort of shit at all. So spare a thought for the spots on the weather map that aren't occupied by fretting journalists and self-preserving politicos.